I have noticed lately quite a few questions from new users that are unfortunately unanswerable because they do not contain enough detail, or code, or data. Rather than re-hashing the usual comments ("please include data!" etc), I was looking for a long-form explanation of how to ask a good question in the site's help pages.
That's when I noticed that, in my opinion, there is a discrepancy between the title and contents of these two help pages for our site:
In particular, after a brief mention of what is on-topic in the first paragraph, the text within the "What topics" page describes, in excellent detail, how to formulate a good question (description of problem, including code, how to format, latex etc).
However, that is content I would have expected under "How to ask a good question"; instead, that page is rather generic in its advice.
Am I misunderstanding the two headings? If not, should we then change the contents of those pages (in essence, move the "how-to" material from "what topics" to "how do I ask")?
/help/on-topic
("What topics..") page, not/help/how-to-ask
("How do I ask...", which is generic to all SE sites) – Andrew T. Mar 7 '19 at 11:27/help/how-to-ask
page I found are the ones for StackOverflow and ServerFault. Apart from becoming one the largest sites on StackExchange ;-) , I wonder what we would need to do to get ours adjusted as well. I still find it weird that the "How to ask a good question" page does not actually contain any site-specific information on how to ask a good question. – MarcoB Mar 7 '19 at 21:37